Readings
• Johanningmeier, E. V., & Richardson, T. (2008). Educational research, the national agenda, and educational reform: A history. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc.
• Kliebard, H. M. (2004). The struggle for the American curriculum: 1893-1958 (3rd ed.). New York, NY: RoutledgeFalmer.
• Manna, P. (2006). School’s in: Federalism and the national education agenda. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
• Stein, S. J. (2004). The culture of education policy. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
• Tyack, D., & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering toward utopia: A century of public school reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
This course allowed me to study the cross-purposes of schooling: national agenda-setting versus local implementation, academic versus applied curricula, competing interest groups, and the layered interweave of all of these. Educational reforms have come and gone, though they continually haunt policy and practice at different times and in different ways. An historical perspective illustrates that many newly created reforms are simply recapitulations of the past.
Johanningmeier and Richardson (2008) examine how educational research is shaped by the national agenda. Reaching into the late nineteenth century when the scientific method and psychological testing in particular were upheld as means to produce order and solve problems of the mind, the authors weave the continuously evolving purposes of schooling with concurrent demands for reform through the beginning of the post World War II era.
By asking questions and providing answers to school problems, educational researchers are implicated as being part of the problem rather than objectively standing apart from it. Between the national agenda set forth by policymakers to correct economic, social, and political problems and the educational agenda instigated by challengers of the status quo, these institutionally supported researchers maintain a self-preserving agenda. The authors assert that “rarely are problems and solutions conceptualized as involving the social and economic structures of society and how those structures disadvantage some and privilege others” (Johanningmeier & Richardson, 2008, p. xi).
The Progressive Era, described as occurring between the Spanish-American War and World War I [1898 - 1918], figures prominently within the text. During this time, the scientific method was applied to schooling, numerical designations (scores) were sold as enhancing school/student efficiency and effectiveness (i.e., more learning given limited inputs), and intelligence testing provided the entrée to measuring achievement. The authors illustrate that calls for greater accountability in schools since this time are based on many of the same arguments for national conformity, stability, and prosperity.
In response to demands from progressive reformers and politicians to achieve order, educational psychologists such as G. Stanley Hall and Arnold Gesell turned to children as testable subjects. The authors assert that Hall’s publication “The Contents of Children’s Minds” (1883) provided the impetus and inspiration for the child study movement that continued through the Progressive Era. Hall, a follower of Herbart’s early nineteenth century philosophy, maintained that educational pedagogy not only conform to students’ correctly identified developmental stage, but also that every idea “be presented in a way that would ensure its connection with an idea the child already had incorporated” (Johanningmeier & Richardson, 2008, p. 189; see also Meyer, 1971 for a discussion on Hall’s humanistic and genetic psychology). Thus, the partitioning and testing of learning units was made possible not only through the conceptualization of childhood as containing distinct stages of development (i.e., expectations to test against), but also from agreement on an agenda to achieve order.
The authors rely upon primary documents produced by foundations, government offices, and national associations, the work of other historians, and individuals credited with prominence in influencing the structure and value of schooling. These documents support the relationship between the dominant assumptions among educational researchers, policymakers, and progressive educators, an evolving educational pedagogy that reified experiments as a means to attain student achievement, and an historical context that shaped the political agenda.
Dominant Assumptions
Johanningmeier and Richardson (2008) challenge three primary assumptions that undergird educational research. These include standardization to increase overall student achievement, normality without consideration of selective exclusion, and the use of composite scores used to indicate aptitude or achievement.
Standardization is the use of testing instruments “system-wide” to produce “normative data that can be used to determine whether all populations are performing at comparable levels and whether some populations are better served than others” (Johanningmeier and Richardson, 2008, p. 23). Conflicts arise over whether they are purposely discriminatory (i.e., deny equal opportunity) in their design, serve as objective tools that enter the hands of decidedly un-objective individuals to become instantly politicized at the point of interpretation and judgment, or confer objectivity by reducing biases in both their design and use. The authors argue that the use of these tests to ascertain achievement gaps between races and ethnicities is determined by a “desired political outcome” (Johanningmeier and Richardson, 2008, p. 407). From the perspective of those with an educational research agenda, the validity of standardized tests is thus secondary to the reliability to conform to politically-determined expectations.
The authors cite Walter Scott Monroe, an educational historian who differentiated 1918 as the dividing line between “pioneer” and “modern” educational research that used intelligence tests (Johanningmeier and Richardson, 2008, p. 36). The Army Alpha and Beta tests used widely during World War I sought to measure intelligence for the purpose of sorting, and the psychologist Lewis Terman refined these tests and argued for their application to children to track them in schools according to the normal distribution curve. Kliebard (2004) discusses how social efficiency proponents such as Joseph Mayer Rice called for standards based on the same scientific use of norm-based measures to reduce waste in schools. Tyack and Cuban (1995) cite the rhetoric of progress defined by school administrators as institutional uniformity and standardization of education during the early twentieth century.
The definition of normal and the stratification of intelligence by race in particular were central to the eugenics movement that crossed through the Progressive Era (late nineteenth developments by Sir Francis Galton continuing through 1963; Johanningmeier and Richardson, 2008; Kliebard 2004). Johanningmeier and Richardson (2008, p. 316) maintain that the population that constitutes a norm and test items ensures a “relationship between scores and social class.” This assertion of cultural bias in norm-referenced testing and standards is similarly advanced by Delpit (2006) and critically evaluated by Dorn (2007), Sleeter (2005), Smedley (1999), and Fass (1989). Dorn (2007) maintains that while prominent in the legacy of school efficiency, intelligence testing has not been the only mechanism of tracking and would likely have been another norm-referenced measure had it not been developed.
An additional dominant assumption in educational research is the use of composite scores used to indicate aptitude or achievement. Johanningmeier and Richardson (2008, p. 320) remain critical of reductive measures and cite “current scientific consensus that intelligence is considerably more complex than what can be expressed in a single score.” The sense that other (i.e., more important and more complex) considerations must be taken into account(ability) underlies an ongoing contrast between humanistic and utilitarian concerns about deficiency and efficiency. Examples include Kliebard (2004, p. 161) quoting the prominent educational theorist John Dewey in 1928 as saying, “quality of activity and of consequence is more important. . .than any quantitative element” (p. 200) and Tyack and Cuban’s (1995, p. 118) examination of how “drilling and practice on the basic skills and performance on standardized” tests were panned as “restrict[ing] the goals of schooling.”
The Post World War II National Agenda
The beginning of the post World War II era (1945 onward) ushered in the Cold War and a heightened role for schools to contribute to national defense. Johanningmeier and Richardson (2008, p. 364) note the significance of a “new cultural order” made possible by the civil rights movement and an emphasis on reducing poverty. The Cooperative Research Act of 1954 is also noted as initiating federal support for educational research. Although described elsewhere as focusing on mental retardation rather than defense, the creation of this federal funding stream enabled further research funding (U.S. Department of Education, 1998).
The October 5, 1957 Soviet Union launch of the Sputnik satellite into Earth’s orbit brought the enactment of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958 that distributed funding to support science, math, and foreign language instruction (U.S. Department of Education, 1998). The following year, the Woods Hole Conference yielded consensus that “many significant advances made in the various disciplines during the previous half century (i.e., the substance and method of science) had not reached elementary and secondary schools” (Johanningmeier and Richardson, 2008, p. 368). Science and math in particular were needed of students rather than for students to compete on a global scale.
Discussion
One slight, stylistic criticism of the text is that it is not for readers who are uninitiated to educational history. Prominent figures at times appear without descriptors such as educator, educational researcher, psychologist, historian, or other functional designations. For example, Samuel P. Hays appears on page 5 with a quote. Readers can work around this by visiting the notes section or using the Internet, but there is considerable cross-referencing needed to read this text.
In addition, there is some mention of grant funding such as $1.5 million for the Coleman Report of 1966 the authors cite as “arguably the most well known and the most comprehensive study of American ducation” (Johanningmeier and Richardson, 2008, p. 393), but there is no statement on the growth of funding over time. As the national agenda has changed in both rhetoric and policy, funding has followed. This author wonders how funding has morphed to support the agenda for math and science, for example.
Dorn (2007) discusses policy feedback and its relationship to the incremental changes to school reform observed by Tyack and Cuban (1995). Although Johanningmeier and Richardson (2008, p. 19) discuss a similar quasi-research feedback when they describe the intergenerational transfer of research methods and approaches to inquiry (what Tyack and Cuban would call a grammar of educational research), they then state that “as the priorities on the nation’s agenda are rearranged, so are the interests of educational researchers.” This implies three dynamics operating between the national agenda and educational research that are not fully explicated: (1) malleability, (2) relationship dependency, and (3) determination on the part of funders to consistently monitor implementation adherence (i.e., fidelity).
Researchers answer to their funding entity’s program/project officer who can certainly alter priorities and shape inquiry based on changing degrees of interest. However, these changes are far more incremental as a degree of emphasis and reflect additional considerations rather than dramatic shifts in the political wind. The authors, for example, describe how the Coleman Report led to “’a flurry of input-output studies’ that examined the relationship between school resources and student outcomes” (Johanningmeier and Richardson (2008, p. 401). This report was influential and led to subsequent research on the (process-product) efficacy of schools and teachers. This dynamic is more similar to policy feedback in this way than the assertion “educational research is basically research about one educational agency—the school. Its agenda reflects and responds to the national agenda. It rarely challenges or questions it” (Johanningmeier and Richardson (2008, p. 402).
Relationship dependency involves alignment based partly on fear of penalties. The text does not explore what happens when educational researchers did not follow their directions either by misinterpretation, incompetence, direct resistance, or what Tyack and Cuban (1995) discuss as pedagogical hybridization. Any number of these, which are not mutually exclusive, can skew the national agenda to fit self-interest in a way that does not conform (also see Ian Hacking’s The Social Construction of What? according to Dorn).
Determination assumes the national agenda is clearly articulated and monolithic. Weaved within the text are policy entrepreneurs as discussed in Manna (2006) that borrow strength by using the language of educational researchers (e.g., the influential reports) and other power brokers (e.g., special interest groups). While there is mention that “society’s decision makers were then [in the post World War II era] soliciting and following the advice not of professional educators but the advice freely offered by those with credentials in the disciplines—disciplines that were typically found not in schools or colleges of education, but in arts and sciences colleges” (Johanningmeier and Richardson (2008, p. 416), there is contrast among those with credentials. Since research ideas are typically floated for funding and not simply handed down, funded educational research may be more a matter of top-down selection than bottom-up alignment.
References
Delpit, L. (2006). Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York, NY: The New Press.
Dewey, J. (1928). Progressive education and the science of education.
Progressive Education, 5, 197-204.
Dorn, S. (2007). Accountability Frankenstein: Understanding and taming the monster. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc.
Fass, P. S. (1989). Outside in: Minorities and the transformation of American education. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Hall, G. S. (1883). The contents of children’s minds. Princeton Review, 11, 248-272.
Johanningmeier, E. V., & Richardson, T. (2008). Educational research, the national agenda, and educational reform: A history. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc.
Kliebard, H. M. (2004). The struggle for the American curriculum: 1893-1958 (3rd ed.). New York, NY: RoutledgeFalmer.
Manna, P. (2006). School’s in: Federalism and the national education agenda. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Meyer, D. H. (1971). The scientific humanism of G. Stanley Hall. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 11, 201-213.
Petty. (n.d.). Retrieved July 23, 2008, from teaching and learning: reflecting on teaching, learning and technology in k-12 education [Msg What troubles me about a national curriculum]. Message posted to http://warrick.edublogs.org/2008/06/05/national-curriculum-2/
Sleeter, C. E. (2005). Un-standardizing curriculum: Multicultural teaching in the standards-based classroom. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Smedley, A. (1999). Race in North America: Origin and evolution of a worldview (2nd ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
U. S. Department of Education. (1998). Archived information: Changing federal strategies for supporting educational research, development, and statistics. Retrieved July 26, 2008, from http://www.ed.gov/pubs/FedStrat/expand.html
Kliebard (2004, p. ix) presents what he describes in the preface to the third edition a “historiographic essay” on U.S. public school curriculum development from 1893-1958. This essay is organized around four primary perspectives that dominated pedagogical arguments of what was needed of students and schools:
(1) Humanism – nurturing reason, aesthetics, and moral development; all canonized subjects are equally valid and all students equally capable.
(2) Developmentalism – scientifically identified child development stages determine readiness for systematic inquiry and reasoning; subjects are attuned to student segments with differential learning needs.
(3) Social efficiency – defined goals attached to measurable, standardized results reduce waste; scientific methods determine subjects.
(4) Social meliorism – a just society is sought by focusing on social justice.
Behind these arguments are prolific, well-connected proponents. Humanists Charles Eliot and William Harris both sought to develop intellect and reasoning, though Harris advocated more directly for a Western cannon of study. Stanley Hall, a supporter of developmentalism, sought to base education on what had already been established in children’s minds during segmented levels of development. Joseph Rice, a founder of social efficiency, attacked schools for their waste and non-adherence to standards (e.g., see Cremin, 1961; see Ayres and Thorndike according to Dorn). Lester Ward, an egalitarian interventionist, was a proponent of social meliorism who refuted the claims of a natural order proposed by Social Darwinists. Kliebard utilizes primary documents (books, reports, magazines, editorials, conference presentations) and historical accounts by other historians as evidence for how these authors advanced their respective interests.
John Dewey is framed as a compiler, taking segments of each mode of thought and blending them to suit his own purposes. Born the year Darwin’s Origin of Species was published (1859), Dewey entered a world imbued with a scientific framework for the progression of life. Critical of the child study movement upheld by developmentalists, he relegated the establishment of children’s interests to a factor of social organization rather than an overarching domain and similarly positioned social determination of roles as multifaceted and fluid rather than fixed. He basically upheld the hypothesis that children should not be positioned as essentialist subjects or predetermined objects, but instead somewhere in between these micro and macro perspectives. He maintained that children are not models for adult aestheticism, as expressed during the Renaissance, nor are they to be purely seen as malleable social tools.
Dewey’s Laboratory School in 1894 operationalized his blended view of curriculum development and pursued one major function for students: adaptation. He traced the evolution of reforms by sequencing discovery of innovation > public support > complaints > return to the status quo. This progression resonates with Tyack and Cuban’s (1995) policy talk reform cycles and continuation of the grammar of schooling (though they also acknowledge institutional change trends, according to Dorn).
Social efficiency proponents (e.g., Rice) who viewed schooling with a utilitarian lens to advance practicality and train students for probable occupational roles supported vocational education. Stemming from the Land Grant College (Morrill) Act of 1862, the impetus for industrial and agricultural training gained further momentum with the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917. Dewey criticized the social injustices and resultant disparities he witnessed during the Great Depression, in addition to the espousal of efficiencies that did not confer benefits to society. His call for independent thinking coadunate with social meliorism during this time gave way to patriotism with World War II on the horizon.
Continuing into 1941 with the U.S. entry into WWII, social efficiency gains traction as students are seen as needing skills that will prepare them for the military, warfare industries, or other war-related contributions. An emerging emphasis on core curriculum based on loosely defined student needs represents a shift from traditional subjects to multidisciplinary approaches to problem-solving during this time. Core referred to required subjects (as opposed to electives) and reversed the traditional method of gaining knowledge and then applying it; instead, core curriculum started with a problem (a “useful form”) and then built skills to solve the problem. An example would be the need to provide or expect change in a monetary transaction that would require math skills, as opposed to learning math skills and then expecting students to know how to count change. In my experience working at a box office in high school and college, I would train students how to use a register who had taken advanced math; amazingly, many did not know how to count change!
October 5, 1957, emerged as the day Sputnik was launched into orbit by the Soviet Union. The next year brought the National Defense of Education Act and its emphasis on science, mathematics, and foreign languages. Kliebard unconvincingly frames this period as advancing in part all of the competing pedagogies among humanism, developmentalism, social efficiency, and social meliorism. He argues that there was a feeling “here and there” that the “intellectual riches being purveyed should be available only for a select few,” yet “by and large, there was an effort to raise the intellectual level for all” (Kliebard, 2004, p. 269). There is no evidence given to support this claim.
Similarly, developmentalists are said to have “partially succeeded in drawing attention to the child life as a key element in curriculum thinking” (Kliebard, 2004, p. 269). How this thinking translates into practice is missing. Social efficiency proponents are described as having “reinforced an instinctive belief on the part of Americans that education ought to be tied to tangible rewards” (Kliebard, 2004, p. 269), yet there is no attribution. Rewards are not apportioned to students, educators, or society. Finally, social meliorists are said to have “brought to the fore the issue of schooling in relation to social progress” (Kliebard, 2004, p. 269). Kliebard points to the role of schools during the struggle for civil rights, yet this is a stretch from the launching of Sputnik.
As a student that inherited what resulted from the struggle for the American curriculum nearly 25 years after the closing of KIiebard’s essay, I do not recognize any of the four primary perspectives of curriculum development. Social efficiency somewhat relates to the use of scientific methods (intelligence quotient testing) to determine tracking of students into basic, average, and advanced during elementary school, the separation of mainstream versus gifted and what was termed Emotionally Handicapped (EH) during middle school, and dropout prevention GOALS students versus advanced, advanced placement (AP), and average tracks during high school. This tracking works against the principle of humanism and its emphasis on equal capability to develop intellect. Developmentalism and its central tenet of student readiness along stages is close to the sequencing of subjects, yet students are held back a grade by administrative default rather than assessing readiness.
Comparing this text with Tinkering with Utopia (Tyack & Cuban, 1995), there is scant overlap in terms of language and key figures, although both use some of the same historical sources. Given the primacy of curriculum in educational reform, it is striking that the texts read as if they are describing two entirely different educational systems. This author’s experience resonates closely with Tyack and Cuban’s analysis rather than Kliebard’s. Schooling in the south, however, may be entirely different from the northern U.S.
References
Cremin, L. (1961). The transformation of the school. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Darwin, C. (1859). On the origin of species by means of natural selection. London, England: John Murray.
Kliebard, H. M. (2004). The struggle for the American curriculum: 1893-1958 (3rd ed.). New York, NY: RoutledgeFalmer.
Tyack, D., & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering toward utopia: A century of public school reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Manna (2006) focuses on the ability of educational policy entrepreneurs to institutionalize their reform interests through laws, policies, and regulations. With their ability to borrow policy selling points that gained traction in extant government institutions, they advance their agendas and form consensus and political capital. Influence is multi-modal, channeling to and from federal, state, and local governments. His descriptions can be compared to networking for the purpose of gaining social capital (see Rosenbaum, Takehiko, Settersten, & Maier, 1990).
Critical of federalism theories that rely on levers such as strong and weak cycles, top-down and bottom-up policy layering, and agenda-setting approached from isolated perspectives within state governments or the Washington Beltway, Manna outlines three primary concepts in Part I of this text: (1) policy entrepreneurs (proponents in positions of influence), (2) license to act (conferred through political capital, policy issue links, official language, and prior policymaking successes), and (3) capacity to act (resources, drive, and impetus) to describe their interrelationships.
However, he provides convoluted figures and a discussion of feedback that points rather than swirls as in Grodzins’ (1966) marble cake metaphor. For example, one could easily replace the outcome of Figures 2.1 and 2.3 (“government interest and involvement in a policy area”) with his exogenous concept “advocacy of a policy entrepreneur” (Manna, 2006, p. 33, 37). The endogenous concepts capacity and license to act should at least point in bimodal directions since he fixates them ceteris paribus in both place and time (rather than in linear motion) within his discussion (he is, as observed by Dorn, a political scientist and not an historian). It is also odd that he traces multiple linear paths in these figures, considering his appreciation of Elazar’s (1984, 1991) “cooperative federalism as a matrix containing multiple centers of power” and criticism of theorist perspectives that do not incorporate notions of simultaneous agenda development (Manna, 2006, p. 23).
Part II illustrates trends in federal interest and involvement in education, his borrowing strength model supported by statistical analyses, and an application of this model to the No Child Left Behind Act. He relies on written and oral statements from elected officials (press releases, campaign messages, speeches, and reports and transcripts from official meetings) to establish measures of federal interest in education, and the state standards movement in the 1990s is presented as the lynchpin of federal involvement in education because it basically provided a common focus for the borrowing of federal-state strength.
Missing from this analysis is a juxtaposition of adequacy lawsuits that have been gaining momentum since 1971 in Serrano v. Priest. This decision, for example, sent shockwaves through California’s educational finance structure that ultimately resulted in decreased per-pupil expenditures and a considerable shift from local to state support (West & Peterson, 2007). Judges stand outside Manna’s model pertaining to policy entrepreneurs, yet their power to alter the dynamics of its components is a major, unexamined consideration.
Part III discusses the flow-through of Elementary and Secondary Education Act resources to state educational agencies (as opposed to state departments of education as do Individuals with Disabilities Education Act funds). This autonomy from state directives is described as generating state-federal tension and a great deal of wiggle room for state level policymakers to look good when it suits them.
Manna also traces the political meanderings of presidents and congressional members that experienced differential license and capacity to enact education reforms. His discussion of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, examined in context with variant control of Congress, governor feedback, public sentiment, and interest group involvement, convincingly support his borrowing strength model. Manna concludes this text by ruminating about additional applications of his model to specific policy decisions, policy entrepreneurs, and other policy areas beyond education. His model at these levels would be informed by existing literature on organizational politics and Lewin’s change process model in particular (Schein, 1996).
References
Elazar, D. J. (1984). American federalism: A view from the states (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Harper and Row.
Elazar, D. J. (1991). Cooperative federalism. In D. A. Kenyon & J. Kincaid (Eds.), Competition among states and local governments: Efficiency and equity in American federalism. Washington, DC: Urban Institute.
Grodzins, M. (1966). The American system: A new view of government in the United States. Chicago, IL: Rand McNally and Company.
Manna, P. (2006). School’s in: Federalism and the national education agenda. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Rosenbaum, J. E., Takehiko, K., Settersten, R., & Maier, T. (1990). Market and network theories of the transition from high school to work: Their application to industrialized societies. Annual Review of Sociology, 16, 263-299.
Schein, E. H. (1996). Kurt Lewin’s change theory in the field and in the classroom: Notes toward a model of managed learning. Systemic Practice and Action Research, 9, 27-47.
West, M. R., & Peterson, P. E. (2007). School money trials: The legal pursuit of educational adequacy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Stein (2004) asserts there is unjust negative framing of students who are poor, disabled, and in need of government assistance. Implicated as stigmatizing, insulting, and corrective toward the students they seek to assist, policymakers, researchers, and teachers use language and routines that cast at-risk, disadvantaged, and marginalized students as defective, deficient, and less-than the norm.
As a grant writer who directs government funding toward populations in need, this author knows there are indeed key terms that frame conditions of suffering, lack of resources, and attributable risks. There is a huge difference, however, between articulating those in need as pathetic and warranting charity versus needing help with circumstances that are largely outside of their control or changing behavior to counteract individual and social harm.
The language used to respond to RFPs/RFAs, for example, is grounded in current literature that does not equate poverty with poor performance, individual attributes, or assumed deficiencies. Instead, there are poverty associations that are suggestive of need. Need is about problems, and poverty is a condition of constant (often daily) crises. In order for resources to proactively prevent or reactively alleviate the experiences of poverty, descriptive negatives need not be avoided or upheld with praise. For example, there is a difference between saying, “there’s a homeless kid” and “there’s a kid who doesn’t have (or has lost) a home.” The latter is an example of People First Language (e.g., VSA Arts, 2007). Stein’s content analysis would not have been able to differentiate the two (the former more stigmatizing than the latter), which illustrates one major limitation of her study.
Stein’s analysis (i.e., condemnation) of the culture of education policy weights heavily on language used to characterize policy beneficiaries, yet contains a thin assessment of the possibility and potential for undoing what she terms the “traps” of this culture (Stein, 2004, p. 143). She implicates the associations of poverty used to rationalize need, the incentive for school administrators to keep test scores low, and attempts at integration as suggestive “that at times being with one’s own ethnic group is a problem” (Stein, 2004, p. 126) and then superficially extends dialogue among educators about bias, school-based leadership, and avoiding low expectations of students as means to address overarching cultural negatives.
Missing from Stein’s discussion are the perspectives of students who are more than capable of speaking for themselves. For example, there is no ladder of participation (McCreary Centre Society, 2002) or statement of the need for representation. This is particularly lacking within Stein’s single paragraph on stigma that discusses how teachers receive Title I eligible student lists. She attempts to connect the Title I designation to low teacher expectations, but is only able to point to “concerns” about this among researchers and politicians (Stein, 2004, p. 23). The immediate question pertaining to this stigma is: Do students perceive they are being stigmatized and treated differently? Since they are the target of concern, one would think she would have raised this question (especially, as observed by Dorn, since her observations were from within schools).
This text may inspire self-reflection about expectations and the gaming of test scores (effectively skewered in Karp, 2004), contribute to an understanding that schools unfortunately have their share of racists, and help researchers understand the difficulty of multisite qualitative analysis. Stein also reminds readers that poverty-oriented policies are typically crafted and enacted by individuals that are not connected to poverty. This statement is illustrative of the rhetorical disconnect that pervades political discourse and the misuse of the conceptualization of poverty as a political organizing tool.
However, Stein does not effectively trace underlying assumptions to legislative language and its implementation. Bias instead pervades unevenly and to an unknown extent at multiple levels, contributing to an overall, loosely defined culture that is reductive by centering problems on students rather than the structures that surround them. Social reproduction theory would have provided a way to organize the antecedents and outcomes of bias in educational policy under the umbrella of culture instead of loosely maintaining that the “culture of policy nurtures both language and ritual where individual and societal biases are exposed and reinforced through school-based practices” (Stein, 2004, p. 128).
References
Karp. S. (2004). NCLB’s selective vision of equality: Some gaps count more than others. In D. Meier & G. Wood (Eds.), Many children left behind: How the No Child Left Behind Act is damaging our children and our schools. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
McCreary Centre Society (2002). Degrees of involvement – the ladder of participation. Retrieved June 18, 2008, from http://www.mcs.bc.ca/ya_ladd.htm
Stein, S. J. (2004). The culture of education policy. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
VSA Arts. (2007). People first: A guide to using people first language (Available from VSA Arts, 3500 E. Fletcher Ave, Suite 234, Tampa, FL 33613).
Tyack and Cuban (1995) describe school reform tensions over the last century as top-down tinkering that excludes teacher and student feedback. They trace the tensions in (1) the belief that schools are means to improve democratic society, (2) cyclical policy talk set against selective implementation within schools, (3) the persistence and resilience of the “grammar of schooling” that standardizes school structures and processes, and (4) the entrance of business models that attempted to replace the efficiency of science with the efficiency of market-driven profit seeking (Tyack & Cuban, 1995, p. 87).
Advocates figure prominently throughout the text, especially those with a stake in policy reform implementation. Administrative progressives upheld educational science as successful by using statistical tools to analyze a growing deluge of standardized tests. Scientifically-based tests were firmly enshrined by the end of the Progressive Era and led a finite path between essentialist and collectivist reforms (Johanningmeier and Richardson, 2008). Reformers are characterized as critical of the grammar of schooling and deftly seek a “middle course between the top-down mode of reform of the administrative progressives and the random approach of letting a thousand flowers bloom” (Tyack & Cuban, 1995, p. 109). Regardless of the self-interested or altruistic intent of these school advocates, their common method is a sales technique to heighten the perceived value of their products. Examples include technology (ranging from blackboards to personal computers), morals and values (such as role expectations associated with home economics, health class topics, or the charity model of Kindergarten), and professional standing (certifications, department sustainability).
The importance of the “right” kind of schooling underlies an important part of the variant levels of policy talk and reform implementation. Audits and noncompliance are constant threats as new reforms are added layers to an evolving culmination of mandates, where a useful analogy may be an onion or marble cake. These reforms are met with teacher confusion, frustration, a sense of futility, criticism, and exhaustion. Such nonplussed reactions, particularly to policy talk, include ignoring reforms, sabotage, minimal compliance, and a hazy blend of old and new. Characterized as mossbacks in need of scientific, technological, or businesslike training, teachers simply take advantage of what they find useful in the classroom.
The authors point to cyclical policy talk in light of a consistent return to the grammar of schooling. Crises come and go as domestic or international problems are emphasized and mete out among other concerns, standards and accountability become hot and cold, and buzz-words such as excellence, advanced skills, and back to basics gain popularity until replaced with new iterations. The grammar of schooling maintains familiar and nostalgic conceptions of schooling, but also “offers a standardized way to process large numbers of people” through what have become standard school components: periods (Carnegie units), grades, and hierarchies (Tyack & Cuban, 1995, p. 107).
Public schooling has been difficult to nail down and change for several reasons: (1) there is no consensus of effective teaching, (2) aside from products such as testing instruments, textbooks, supplies, etc., schooling is not profitable, and (3) teachers hold considerable power over curriculum and instruction. Tyack and Cuban naturally advocate for working collaboratively with teachers because the first two difficulties have proven insurmountable (unless students are taught to the test, given the answers to the test, or are selected).
What is odd in the text is that there is no unemployment rate to gauge opportunity. A tantalizing quote is presented from Business Week columnist Robert Kuttner about the relatively minimal supply of jobs requiring advanced skills compared to demand created by schooling, yet there are no snapshot figures or trends that provide a clear, historical picture of the discordance between education levels and job placement (i.e., actual use of education). The perception that schooling does not help with future job placement or wage increases is a serious threat to the value of schooling as a primary means to generate opportunity. Broader economic forces are certainly responsible for job creation, yet there is an argument that schooling leads to economic productivity. This paradox (see Education Policy Blog, 2007) definitely sours the authors’ statement that “the issue at hand. . .is not to convince citizens that schooling is important; there is still a deep faith that better education is linked to societal progress” (Tyack & Cuban, 1995, p. 39). Dorn (1993) maintains that “the economic opportunities of adolescents shaped school attendance” and “the paucity of jobs during the Great Depression consolidated a longer shift of adolescents from work to school, giving high schools an explicit role in warehousing teenagers away from labor markets” (p. 373). Is warehousing progress?
This text contributes to the history of childhood by explaining the diffusion and retraction of school reform innovations. Teachers are notably absent from the policymaking arena, students are dependent recipients of instruction rather than active participants, and the public is splintered into advocacy factions. One wonders if the future of school reforms will be a continuation of putting old wine in new bottles or a reassessment of the current context based on historical perspective. The latter would likely reduce reductive tinkering (e.g., single-sex schooling) and enhance “preserving what is valuable and reworking what is not” (Tyack and Cuban, 1995, p. 5).
References
Dorn, S. (1993). Origins of the “dropout problem.” History of Education Quarterly, 33(3), 353-373.
Education Policy Blog. (2007, April 16). Does education create jobs? The difference between “education” and “empowerment.” Retrieved July 18, 2008, from http://educationpolicyblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/does-education-create-jobs-difference.html
Johanningmeier, E. V., & Richardson, T. (2008). Educational research, the national agenda, and educational reform: A history. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc.
Tyack, D., & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering toward utopia: A century of public school reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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